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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JRI who wrote (138929)	8/11/1999 9:07:00 PM
From: jttmab	Respond to of 176387

Trading DELL I'm watching for the action at 44; if Friday we have a close above 44 you might expect to see 48 Tuesday intraday. BTW, next time I talk to AG I'll mention that he should at list give you a PM. <g> Best Regards, Jim

To: JRI who wrote (138929)	8/11/1999 9:09:00 PM
From: jmac	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

Don't be too sure. Beige was friendly, but PPI and CPI numbers could put a screeching halt to the fun we had today. Tomorrow's new claims number will play a role too. Frankly, I think too much is being made of all of this "bad economic growth" by the bond market. I can not believe bonds got to 6.27% today before the Beige.

To: JRI who wrote (138929)	8/11/1999 10:18:00 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 176387

***Please Read the entire message for some BONUS insights on DELL... BussinessWeek Online highlights DELL and their internet efforts...FYI... <<Even before the birth of the public Internet, Dell's supply chain was efficient, its inventories lean, and its profits lush. ...Then the Internet happened, and Dell began minting money. Today, instead of daily fax alerts to warehouses telling everyone what supplies are needed, Dell sends messages out every two hours over the Net. Dell's suppliers also get an inside view of the company's inventories and production plans, and they receive constant feedback on how well they are meeting shipping cri-teria. Now, its speed in customizing and delivering products is unmatched. Inventory on hand is down to eight days--vs. Compaq's 26--and revenue growth is about 55%. The Internet, is helping Dell shatter conventional wisdom about how computers are best bought and sold. Compaq, HP, and IBM have tried to clone Dell's direct-sales model. And they've all snatched up similar electronic tools to streamline dealings with retailers. But the new supply-chain logic demands revolutionary tactics and a rethinking of every business process, which for now elude Dell's competitors, who still rely heavily on dealers. The PC prices you will find on IBM's direct-to-consumer Web pages aren't any lower than what's already available in retail stores, and they don't match Dell's. For all the ruckus Net-age wizards like Dell may be causing, the result long-term likely will be an explosion of brand-new business. Even as some businesses see their prospects dim, new digital middlemen--call them cybermediaries--are cropping up to fill opportunities spawned by E-commerce. NEW WAVE. Experts see a big role for sites that bring together buyers and sellers and provide value by offering trusted advice, personal service, or other benefits. This, says Zona's Ryder, is the start of the third wave of Internet commerce: not just saving money, not just selling existing products online, but generating new wealth. Says Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park, Calif.: ''At the end of the day, you end up with more intermediaries, not fewer.'' These new cybermediaries range from portals such as Yahoo! to Net startups that are creating unique markets on the Net--such as FastParts Inc., a site where electronics companies around the world buy and sell surplus parts. ''If the Internet hadn't come along,'' says FastParts Chairman Gerry Haller, ''this business wouldn't have worked.'' The business models these upstarts are employing are as diverse as they are inventive. Some, such as Instill Corp.--which serves as a virtual order desk for restaurants and food-service operators--streamline an inefficient buying process. Others are consumer magnets, drawing buyers with useful info or services and steering them to manufacturers and service providers, in return for a fee or a cut of transactions. These services include sites such as Auto-By-Tel and Autoweb.com, credit companies such as Get-Smart.com and E-Loan, and insurance services such as InsWeb Corp. Some of the greatest opportunities lie in using the Net to simplify complex and costly transactions. Realtor.com, a site for home buyers, is streamlining the harrowing task of purchasing a home. Stuart Wolff, CEO of the startup in Westlake Village, Calif., figures there are up to a dozen middlemen involved in a typical home sale, from Realtors to title agents. Realtor.com, which is affiliated with the National Association of Realtors, directs shoppers to one of its realtors--no surprise. But it hopes to automate many other aspects of home sales, such as loans and title searches. These digital middlemen aim to be the nexus of large numbers of buyers and sellers. The key dynamic: Once the cybermediary gathers a critical mass of buyers and sellers, more keep flocking there, because that's where the action is. ''Do you want to be where there're 800 Beanie Babies or 8,000 Beanie Babies?'' asks Meg Whitman, CEO of eBay, a Web site that lets individuals auction off products to each other. By continuing to gather buying power, digital go-betweens will soon be able to flex some muscle up the supply chain. Ask Payam Zamani, co-founder and executive vice-president of Autoweb.com. He believes his site offers such an economical way to reach car buyers that it will spur consolidation among dealers, and Autoweb will take on more of the customer relationship. ''The business model is not complete until we control 100% of the buying process,'' says Zamani. What does the auto-sales business of the future look like? ''Ultimately, there will be virtual dealerships. It will be more cost-effective to send cars to homes to test-drive than to have 300 cars sitting in a lot.'' Naturally, traditional dealers and manufacturers don't relish the idea of these upstarts gaining all the clout, so they, too, are jockeying for position. Early starters such as Cisco are already selling $11 million in networking gear a day on the Net, and Dell is selling $5 million a day in PCs. Yet most existing businesses must walk a fine line on the Net. They risk upsetting partnerships with distributors and retailers. Conflict with an existing sales channel was the biggest impediment to selling online cited by respondents to a recent BUSINESS WEEK/Harris poll. That's hard to justify when Net commerce is still so small relative to their overall businesses, and returns far from certain. And it explains why firms such as Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Merrill Lynch & Co. are deliberating over how to go online, where discount brokers proliferate. ''On the Internet, there's no shortage of information, but wisdom is a valued commodity,'' says Randal Langdon, director of interactive-sales technologies for Merrill Lynch, which is cautiously moving its business--and its 14,000 financial consultants--onto the Net. No wonder the Net is keeping a lot of executives and business owners up at night. Liz Heller, executive vice-president at Capitol Records Inc., for instance, is worried that unauthorized Net-based music sites could soon take a big bite out of CD sales. ''It's all happening faster than we thought,'' she frets. ''How do you stop a moving train?'' Make that a speeding bullet. By Robert D. Hof in San Mateo, Calif., with Gary McWilliams in Houston and Gabrielle Saveri in San Francisco>> ------------------------------------------------------------- Hmmmm.....maybe DELL is MUCH MORE than a very efficient global hardware producer. I guess I like ING Barrings' description in their new research report this morning... <<We view DELL as a Unique, Ultra-Efficient "Channel," Not Just a PC Maker...a primary source of DELL's Power flows from the fact that the company represents more than simply a PC maker, but more correctly a unique and ultra-efficient product and services " channel." To date the fact that PCs, and increasingly enterprise systems, have become more commoditized, has thereby played directly into this strength. Over the coming years, we expect this position to become even more apparent as DELL increasingly capitalizes on the direct closed-loop relationship that it has built with its customers. In commercial markets, this should include an expanding variety of products and services being funneled through customized web-based Premiere Pages (currently numbering around 20,000). In the consumer market, DELL has only recently begun to capitalize on its leading web capabilities by launching the Gigabuys.com online store, DELLauction site and DELLnet-branded Internet access service and portal.>> Wow, a few of the analysts are starting to catch on <VBG>....they seem to be putting some of the pieces of the puzzle together. IMO, a number of Fund Mangers and Individual Investors totally UNDERESTIMATE DELL's potential in the years ahead...Kemble and William B. Michaels are on the other end of the spectrum..!! Best Regards, Scott

To: JRI who wrote (138929)	8/11/1999 11:13:00 PM
From: jhg_in_kc	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 176387

<will probably sell Friday>WHY? WILL WE NOT RETURN TO THE ANNALS OF YESTERYEAR? 50% GROWTH?

To: JRI who wrote (138929)	8/23/1999 2:56:00 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 176387

~OT~...' Economic Basics Predict Apocalypse'...FYI... From the San Francisco Examiner (Sunday, Aug 22, 1999) examiner.com ================================ <<Economic Basics Predict Apocalypse Rick Ackerman Sunday, Aug. 22, 1999 The dismal science will never be the same if Dr. Kurt Richebacher's dire predictions for the global economy should come to pass. The former chief economist and managing partner at Germany's Dresdner Bank says a deflationary collapse lies ahead that will ravage the world's bourses and usher in a dark period of austerity and financial discipline. Probably not one economist in 50 shares his views, at least not publicly. Richebacher, now living in France, says many of his American colleagues have been seduced into ignorance and complicity by Wall Street's billions as well as by their love affair with mathematical models that shun fundamental laws of economics. Where they see a New Era of productivity growth and industrial efficiency, he sees duplicitous bookkeeping and manufacturing's steep decline. They talk of a booming U.S. economy; he sees a profitless mirage. They worship capitalism's bold risk-takers; he scorns them for recklessly piling leverage to the sky. Someone's going to be wrong, but judge for yourself who. Like the theories of Copernicus 500 years before him, Dr. Richebacher's logic strikes one as no less sound and compelling than the Polish scientist's once-heretical notion that the earth revolves around the sun. Richebacher asserts that the U.S. investment boom in computers borders on statistical hoax. It began in 1995 with the government's implementation of a "hedonic" price index designed to capture both the falling prices and the rapid rise of computational power of each new computer. This is akin to measuring GM's auto sales by tallying the horsepower of all the engines in its cars, says Richebacher. Applied to the computer business, it has exaggerated investment levels exponentially. For example, during the 12-month period ended March 31 the business sector increased its net investment in computers from $91.8 billion to $97.2 billion, accounting for a paltry 1.3 percent of nominal GDP growth. But when government statisticians multiply that $5.4 billion increase by their hedonic supercharger, the figure swells to $146 billion. This has worked wonders on America's bottom line, boosting the computer sector's nominal 1.3 percent contribution toward GDP growth for the period to 49 percent, and the 4 percent contribution for the years 1996-1998 to 38 percent. For the first half of 1999, the effect has been even more pronounced, giving the computer industry a whopping 93 percent share of GDP growth. Remove the computer industry from the ledger, however, and the vastly larger rest of the economy had actual growth of just 2.5 percent during the three-year period vs. a reported 4 percent. Meanwhile, last year's expansion would have been a middling 2 percent, and the uptick in productivity that has recently cheered economists would fade to insignificance. The obvious question is, how could the computer industry, with barely more than 1 percent of the total workforce and plunging product prices, be responsible for what most economists read as a dramatic improvement in America's standard of living? The answer is that it could not. And has not. Hedonic accounting makes the computer sector look like an economic hero, but any statistically significant improvement in our standard of living would necessarily have to come from the spreading use of computers across the entire economy. Computers are indeed everywhere, but evidence that they have substantially boosted U.S. productivity remains elusive to say the least, says Richebacher. In this assertion he has corroborating testimony from no less an authority than Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan. In a 1997 speech in Frankfurt, Germany, Greenspan acknowledged that a straightforward interpretation of certain service-economy data suggests that productivity ? output per man hour ? has actually been falling for more than two decades. Greenspan called this implausible, offering the explanation that prices may have been mismeasured. But whatever the reason for the anomaly, the Fed chairman is obviously at pains to convince us that he and his staff of Ph.D.s truly understand how to measure productivity accurately. If productivity growth in recent years has been largely illusory, the spectacular expansion of credit during that same time has been all too real, warns Richebacher (pronounced REESH-a-baisher). It didn't happen by accident. The economist says the Fed started the real orgy last fall with a series of rate cuts intended to shore up some hedge funds that had gotten in way over their heads by amassing huge positions in leveraged credit instruments. The Fed's massive gift to debtors quickly found its way into the mortgage markets, where homeowners ran up new borrowings in 1998 to more than $1.5 trillion, nearly two-thirds of it in refinancings. The hot money spread like lava into the financial system. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, quasi-governmental agencies which buy up mortgage loans, expanded their balance sheets four times as quickly as they had the previous year, with $220 billion of growth vs. $61 billion in 1997. This put an estimated $15,000 into the pocket of each re-fi customer, kicking off a spending binge that pumped housing and stock prices to record heights. It also created a financial bubble whose collapse Richebacher says we will eventually have to reckon with. He says the four classic elements of a bubble are all present and most obvious: 1) money and credit have been expanding vastly in excess of both savings and GDP growth; 2) inflationary pressures are being channeled toward, and concentrated in, asset prices; 3) low inflation has kept monetary policy too loose; 4) soaring asset prices have overstimulated domestic borrowing and spending. The Richebacher Letter, published by Baltimore-based Agora Publishing, circulates widely among top-level financial decision-makers, probably because it is so good at poking holes in the prevailing wisdom. What has he been saying lately? Just this: Profit performance in the U.S. economy has been appalling during the stock market's steep rise of the last several years, but accounting gimmicks designed to please Wall Street have masked the weakness. Compared to a year ago, profits per share on the S&P 500 have declined from $39.72 to $37.71, and on the S&P Industrial Index from $42.13 to $38.37. Over that time, as all investors know, share prices on the S&P 500 have risen spectacularly. The trade deficit, which sent $233.4 billion abroad last year, is the biggest profit-killer in the economy. It has been offset, albeit precariously, by a household sector that has consumed manically with borrowed dollars and dissavings. The bulls believe the Fed will keep the credit machine running full speed if the economy starts to falter. But full speed is not enough, since sustaining growth in the economy and the stock market will require ever-larger credit injections. With the personal savings rate already in negative territory, it is by now manifestly impossible to increase dissavings to the extent necessary to produce continued economic growth. The "profit miracle" of the 1990s is nonsense. What kicked the stock market into high gear earlier in the decade was mainly the one-time effect of lower borrowing costs induced by a recklessly generous Fed. Profits have weakened since in absolute terms and egregiously relative to soaring share prices. The widespread use of stock options to compensate employees has caused corporate earnings to be grossly overstated, since the options reduce the amount of wages charged against profits. If properly accounted for, stock options would have lowered aggregate published profits by 56 percent in 1997 and 50 percent in 1998, according to figures Richebacher cites from Smithers & Co., a London-based research institute. Derivatives can insure individual market participants against risk, but not system as a whole. Ultimately they have spurred higher risk-taking through leverage, exposing the global financial system to the prospect of devastating failure. Richebacher, who counts former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker among his close friends, says U.S. economists of the 1960s would more readily have recognized these problems and acted stridently to counteract them. Public discussion was still influenced back then by staid economists who represented the banks and who knew their theory. The current crop, however, is "really a part of Wall Street's sales force to sell shares," he says. In contrast with European economists, their theoretical thinking is "not too deep," notes Richebacher, and in recent years has been completely eclipsed by mathematical models that fail miserably in reckoning with the crucial variable of human behavior. The current level of thinking is "unbelievable," he says. "How can you simply overlook a negative savings rate and mountainous trade deficit" in saying the economy is healthy and robust? "There is almost no one left in America to pose critical questions about economic fundamentals," he laments. Meanwhile, "the only miracle about the American economy is the consumer's amazing propensity to borrow," a fact which Richebacher says has delayed a day of reckoning. Even if there were someone raising such questions, one might ask, would anyone be listening? Inquiries concerning The Richebacher Letter should be directed to Richebacher@agora-inc. Rick Ackerman forecasts stock, index and commodity futures prices for market professionals in his daily newsletter, Little Black Box Forecasts. >>